Buzz in Indian IT Industry

Y2011 for Indian IT Industry –

Focused strategy: In the past, IT industry has been large supply-driven. There was a lot of demand and those who were able to keep the delivery engine going were the winners. This system generally emphasized ability to hire and deliver over sales, marketing and company strategy. However, in an industry with increased competition, that is likely to change and winners are those who have a razor-sharp focus rather than pursuing all business.

2011: Watch for more firms to tighten their strategies and get more focused. Bottom-up, consensus-driven business plans will give way to top-down decisive strategies

Consultative Approach: Cognizant entering the top 3 and Patni-iGATE combo providing another $1 billion firm will provide more viable options for clients. This is likely to lead to pricing pressure on the incumbent providers. The only two routes to avoid this are (a) non-linear, more automated delivery and (b) consultative solutions

2011: Watch for investments in non-linear platforms and greater focus on consulting.

Sales & Marketing: As we move from a supply-driven phase to one that is more demand driven in an era of consolidation, brand differentiation and brand premium matter much more. In addition, as the market gets tougher, there will be greater emphasis on managing the offerings portfolio and understanding technology trends - a great opportunity for marketing to play a more strategic role.

2011: Expect the enlightened few to start investing in a strong brand. The front-runners will break away for the tag of “Indian IT” and be seen as global players like IBM and Accenture

-Cheers

Back-up in Cloud - good solution

Riverbed Whitewater Appliance is a new product that was introduced in November-2010.  It optimizes backups into the cloud, using the same kinds of de-duplication and optimization that Riverbed Steelhead appliances use across the WAN.  It brings security (SSL, 256-bit AES), and reduction in the amount of data that flows into the cloud, while keeping a local copy of the backed up data on the appliance.  And it works with most current backup applications - NetBackup, Backup Exec etc.

Whitewater appliances leverage a number of characteristics to deliver optimum performance for accelerating backups to cloud storage.

Deduplication- Industry-leading deduplication eliminates redundant data within backup streams. The Whitewater appliance’s deduplication is byte-based with variable-size dedupe segments. This is more granular than regular fixed or variable block-based deduplication and provides an additional 50-70 percent savings on storage and bandwidth requirements.

Security- The data ingested by Whitewater appliances is secured with 256-bit AES at rest, and with SSL v3 in-flight across the network. This dual layer of security minimizes the risk of data being compromised.

Local storage The Whitewater appliance has a finite-sized disk. This keeps backup data local while it’s replicated to the cloud. Most recent restores come from the appliance, and are also local. If older restores are needed, the data is brought back from the cloud.

Integration- Whitewater appliances integrate with existing backup products and can be mounted as a CIFS or NFS target to the media server. At the backend they write directly to cloud storage via REST/HTTP/SOAP APIs. This is done without any rip-and-replace of existing backup systems, and with minimal configuration changes.

-Cheers

Patni's cloud journey...

Standardization - Consolidation-Virtulization- Extreme Virtulization - Private Cloud- Public Cloud...

Patni views cloud computing as the next evolution of its own internal data center consolidation. The company went virtual and runs about 90% of its line of business applications in a private cloud -- it's now in the process of moving about 30% of that cloud into AWS - Amazon.

“In the last eight months we have started moving much of the dev environment onto the AWS platform,” said Satish Joshi, executive vice president for Patni.
Patni started by developing monitoring and provisioning systems based on VMware’s APIs and had managed an eye-popping level of consolidation.

Patni supports 15,000 users on about 80 high-octane servers (two racks) that run 400 virtual machines. It runs an additional 200 legacy physical servers for certain older applications that it’s not convenient to move but which may eventually get phased out. It also runs hosting environments for many customers, many of which are virtualized, but they’re not part of Patni’s private cloud environment.
The firm plans to move about 30% of that cloud infrastructure directly to Amazon overall, and expects the three-year cost to come in at around $1.7 million, a 15% savings over internal operation. While the savings weren’t out of this world, in his view, the real benefits were not in the cost, but in the flexibility a public cloud environment enables.

There isn't a good way to quantify that, but what you gain is definitely a benefit. … Our internal provisioning time used to be days and now that has been cut down to less than a day.
Patni has been in operation for more than twenty years, and he said the biggest headache in the move to a hybrid cloud platform was standardization across what was practically a living history museum of IT hardware.

We had all the vintages of server hardware, all vintages of networking gear. There was a lot of standardization we had to do. Patni’s move to cloud was really driven by the need to stay ahead of its customers, who were also clamoring for next-generation platforms. By now most of its customers will have done some kind of virtualization and some streamlining and now wanted different types of service. Probably the biggest change has been in the nature of the engagement.

Of course, there are always tradeoffs. Patni and other MSPs love the flexibility and utility of cloud, but it’s remote; and for a global organization, that is a critical issue. Joshi said that careful planning and study are necessary for anyone venturing into the cloud.

Part of this migration plan actually includes increased spending on communication infrastructure. If the expansion of communication infrastructure was not required, the saving would have been much more dramatic.

Gartner view on Amazon

Amazon is a cloud IaaS-focused vendor with a very pure vision of highly automated, inexpensive, commodity infrastructure, bought without any commitment to a contract. Its paid-by-the-hour compute offering is the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), a Xen-based infrastructure; it also offers cloud storage, cloud CDN and a number of PaaS-like services.

Strengths

• Amazon is a thought leader; it is extraordinarily innovative, exceptionally agile and very responsive to the market. It has the richest cloud IaaS product portfolio, and is constantly expanding its service offerings and reducing its prices.
• Amazon has a very strong partner ecosystem; many software vendors have specially licensed and packaged their software to run on EC2, easing deployment and eliminating some of the headaches associated with licensing software to run in the cloud.
• Amazon provides full API access to its infrastructure, emphasizing this over portal capabilities. The API is supported by many third parties that provide associated management tools; we recommend also evaluating RightScale and VMLogix LabManagerCE when evaluating Amazon's services.
• Amazon has by far the largest pool of capacity, which makes it one of the few infrastructures that are suitable for intensively "bursty" workloads, such as scientific computing, modeling and simulation, and other applications that may require short-term provisioning of hundreds of servers at a time. Amazon also offers specialized infrastructure options for high-performance computing.
• Recommended use: Scale-out computing; self-managed IaaS for test and development.

Cautions

• Amazon does not offer any managed services. As it expands its service portfolio, it is adding offerings that automate some aspects of infrastructure management, such as its Relational Database Service for MySQL. However, today, these services do not provide the core basic functions of the lightly managed IaaS use case.
• Amazon is the only evaluated vendor that does not also offer the standard options of colocation, dedicated nonvirtualized servers (often used for databases), and private non-Internet connectivity (although Amazon will negotiate peering). These components are critical for many customers, who need hybrid, not pure cloud, environments.
• Amazon has the weakest cloud compute SLA of any of the evaluated competing public cloud compute services, even though its uptime is actually very good. Most providers offer 99.99% or better, with many offering 100%, evaluated monthly, with service credit capping at 100% of that monthly bill. Amazon offers 99.95%, evaluated yearly, capping at 10% of that bill, and requires that at least two availability zones within a region be unavailable.
• Amazon is a price leader, but it charges separately for optional items that are often bundled with competitive offerings. Prospective customers should be careful to model the costs accurately, especially network-related charges. Support is not included — it is a 10% to 20% uplift to the price, and it is geared primarily toward technically knowledgeable, expert users.
• Amazon's offering is developer-centric, rather than enterprise-oriented, although it has significant traction in large enterprises. Its services are normally purchased online with a credit card; traditional corporate invoicing must be negotiated as a special request. Prospective customers who want to speak with a sales representative can fill out an online form to request contact; Amazon does have field sales and solutions engineering. Amazon will negotiate and sign contracts known as Enterprise Agreements, but customers often report that the negotiation process is frustrating.

-Cheers

Unscrambling cloud further...!

There are more opprtunities for IT services providers in Private cloud side - VCE kind of a cloud in enterprise, VPC of Amazone in virtual and white labled cloud service for Managed Private Cloud.

Cheers